Since the AR Conference, I've been to Pennsylvania (e.g. Allentown) and New Jersey (e.g. Freehold) to give a few presentations, and am now back in Charlotte's place in St. Michaels, Maryland. Following are the new developments:

1. HOPE-GEO has changed focus to target secondary schools as of September. The HOPE-GEO team has been developing school databases and contacting the principals, aiming for talks starting around mid-September.

2. Another new focus is the mayors of U.S. cities. Recall that back in May this year in Florida the Conference of U.S. Mayors, involving several hundred mayors from across the country, resolved to ban the use of Alberta-tar-sands-derived gasoline in their city vehicular fleets. The objective of this new focus is to induce more U.S. mayors to sign on to this resolution. So, the HOPE-GEO team has also been compiling a database of the mayors of the cities in the states I'll be traversing for the rest of the tour, and started sending exploratory emails to their offices.

3. A special focus of this is to target the cities on the seaward side of the new coastline given a certain amount of sea-level rise due to global warming - e.g. 7 meters (23 ft.) if the Greenland ice-sheet melts off (which of course won't happen in isolation - with the mountain glaciers and the Antarctic ice-shelves melting along with it, raising the sea-level even higher). If all the land ice has melted off, the sea level would be some 100 meters or 330 ft higher than today's. I'm calling this outreach the Future-Submerged-Cities Tour. If we use this ultimate figure of total global ice meltdown, almost all the states in the US east coast, southeast and south coasts would be submerged. This should have media potential.

4. To expand the media potential, HOPE-GEO could tie a line of ribbons (the survey type) along the new coastline. The local papers in all the cities along the ribbon-line, and of course those on the seaward side of it, should be interested.

5. Since the beginning of the tour on July 1, I've taken some 300GB's worth of videos: of the fly-over of the Alberta tar sands, of Taina Ketola interviewing me while I was driving to and from the tar sands through British Columbia and Alberta, my lectures to various audiences from states to state, and my 13 speeches at the Animal Rights National Conference. It does our children, the animals and the Earth no good to have the footage sitting in my external hard-drive. So, I spent the last 2 weeks self-teaching video conversion, video editing and video launching on to YouTube and MySpace, starting from a know-nothing position. My initial impulse was to send the raw videos in DVD or flash-drive forms to a volunteer who knows what he/she is doing, but eventually I arrived at the position of wanting to do it myself. First thing I found out was that most video editing and conversion programs require at least 2GB RAM, some say 3GB, for enough power to process video, in which light my old laptop, with only a 512MB RAM and a near-full 70GB hard-drive, was entirely inadequate. I tried it and it was indeed a video-snail. So I went shopping, and got a Toshiba with a 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard-drive ($490 @ Best Buy). As of day before yesterday, I've begun uploading videos on to YouTube, beginning with 2 events at the AR2008 conference (the Sharon Christman song and my plenary speech Acting Globally, both in lo-res), then 16 segments of my flight over the tar sands, followed by several of my other conference sessions plus the Christman song and my plenary again, but in hi-res). Now I've loaded about half of my dozen AR2008 speeches (usually maximum 12 minutes each - ideal for YouTube). I'll upload the rest of the speeches in the coming days, plus some of my interviews while driving to and from the tar sands. To view the videos go to www.YouTube.com and search for "Anthony Marr"; they should all appear. And keep checking over the next weeks. Now is the time to beginning publicising the videos.

6. Future bookings are trickling in, including a presentation in Middlesex NJ on Oct. 4 (Steve Ember, whose functions are often well attended), one in Lower Manhattan NY on Oct. 9 (Adam Weissman, Wetlands Preserve), and one in Bethlehem PA, date to be determined.

No comments:

About Anthony Marr

Anthony Marr
* has a degree in physics
* is the author of "OMNI-SCIENCE and the Human Destiny" (2003) and "Homo Sapiens SAVE YOUR EARTH" (2008)
* 1995, he cleaned up N. American Chinatowns of endangered species medicines
* 1996, he led "the highest-profile anti-trophy-hunting campaign in Canada" (Globe and Mail).
* 1997-1999, he worked in 3 tiger reserves in India.
* 1999, he founded Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE).
* 2004/2005, he conducted operations in Japan against whaling and dolphin slaughter.
* 2003-2011, completed 7 Compassion for Animals Road Expeditions (CARE tours, each covering 30-45 states over 4-7 months), and spoke at the National AR Conference every year
* 2009, he founded the Global Anti-Hunting Coalition (GAHC)
* 2010, he won the Henry Spira Grassroots Activist Award.
www.HOPE-CARE.org
www.facebook.com/AnthonyMarr001
www.HomoSapiensSaveYourEarth.blogspot.com
www.AnthonyMarr13.wordpress.com
www.Dying-for Salvation.blogspot.com